Max Conrad

In the late 1950’s, journalist Percy Knauth had the opportunity of accompanying the legendary ferry pilot Max Conrad on a trip from an airport in Flushing, New York across the Atlantic to Paris in a diminutive Piper Apache.  Here is how Knauth described Conrad’s flying:

This man, when he is in the air, is in the familiar place.  Once off the ground, he seems to relax, to be at home.  He flies with absolutely effortless ease, without any apparent conscious application; he flies the way other men walk; he seems literally to have been born to it… He sits hunched forward, one hand on the wheel, feet gathered beneath him, his eyes constantly searching ahead and to both sides, every sense, his whole body seeming to reach out into that gray and turbulent world through which we dash with the urgency of a great bird seeking shelter from an approaching storm.  Max doesn’t seem to be in the airplane at all; he seems to be out there, sniffing the air, probing it, trying to sense what’s ahead; and what his hands do on the wheel is mere instinctive reaction to what his senses feel outside.  I have never seen anything like this at all, but now I know what manner of man gave birth to that trite phrase: “He was born to fly.”

What does it mean to be born to fly?  For that matter, what does it mean to be born to do anything? When I first moved to Ojai, I had the opportunity of meeting the great Mad Magazine cartoonist Sergio Aragones, who was kind enough to give me a tour of his studio.   I mentioned to him how much I envied his talent, given that I couldn’t draw to save my life and am convinced that I was lacking that particular gene.  He reacted almost violently, telling me that there really wasn’t such a thing as inborn talent, that initially he couldn’t draw either, and that it was all practice.   He said to me, “If you want to draw a nose, you have to draw a nose a thousand times…. 10,000 times, until you get it right.”

What Percy Knauth failed to mention in his beautiful description of Conrad’s flying ability is that Conrad began flying as a teenager, and had flown more than 30,000 hours by the time Mr. Knauth flew with him.   That’s a lot of noses.

When we see young children who can somehow make songs out of random notes on a piano, or draw faces on paper that actually resemble faces, we see it as talent.   But for reasons probably having to do with wanting to preserve our species, we don’t let children strap on airplane wings and jump off the side of a mountain.  Maybe if we did we would discover that there really are some people who were “born to fly.”

After all, is it any more natural for humans, born without wings or discernible rudders, to fly through the air than it is to sit down at a piano, press black and white levers and have a melody emerge?  Maybe Sergio was right, and doing anything so seamlessly that it appears natural is like the old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall; it is all practice.